In Chicago, In Foreclosure

Mayor Daley is really outdoing himself when he is asked about the foreclosure rate in Chicago. In the big city of New York, 1 in 305 homes are in foreclosure. Chicago has 1 in 88. Mayor Daley, that is a massive failure for you and your administration of political hacks. Mayor Daley blamed everyone but himself. He said the Feds need to address the issue and the mortgage companies are at fault. Most people that are in foreclosure, took out to large of a loan, lost a job, had a spouse lose a job. Many time it is from gambling, drugs, and booze. Many times it is from a divorce, and we know divorce is directly linked to finances. Daley and his cronies are trying to pass more taxes on bottled water, why in the hell would Daley and his administration be drinking bottled water in public, this is an insult. (We covered that topic here over a year ago) Daley is as guilty of screwing up finances as anyone, but remember, most homeowners cannot sell a bridge or a parking lot to bail out of mismanagement. Most homeowners do not have a private police force to go out and increase revenue by ticketing drivers (customers) for revenue shortfalls. I hope Chicago takes a closer look to the high amount of foreclosures, Daley is anti-labor, pro-big business. I hope when you think about taking out a second mortgage to pay Chicago's high taxes, you think twice about your Mare Daley and his wild spending that YOU are paying for. Patrick McDonough.

Having just returned to a trip to the East Coast (flying in and out of LaGuardia Airport in New York City), what I observed might explain in part the foreclosure rate differences between here and New York. Out there, the number of those types of newer housing units (the ones that seem to end up in foreclosure) are few and far between. Housing there is so expensive that anyone who is coverting units there is doing it for a far higher income group than in Chicago.

Loan people way more than they could normally afford to borrow, by enticing them with 'below market' rates, so they can pay more for the home of their dreams then they thought they could, sucker them into taking on what will soon be much higher payments per month than they can handle, when these 'bargain loans' come due for 'adjustment', don't, God forbid, carry over the same below market terms you suckered them with, no, give them 3 lousy months to try to keep up with the new, higher payments, then drop the hammer of foreclosure on them, take their property and resell it to recoup the initial loan amount, while having profited from the previous period of 90%+ interest payments.

What a scheme.

The only problem is, apparently, nobody figured on the real estate market dropping out from under them, causing many of those pieces of property to be worth much less than the loan balance, IF they can be sold at all.

The obvious solution, rolling over those below market loans at the same or slightly higher rate, to allow those homeowners to continue to have a home and to continue to pay those monthly payments, still being 90%+ interest, to keep the cash flowing and the housing markets stable, seems to have been too much to expect from these greedy money-grubbers.

They made their own beds, let them suffer, like the people they conned are suffering.